Living and Loving with Annotations

Nothing sets a man's heart aflame quite like some glorious footnotes. First you're reading something and learning stuff, and then you see a number and you go to the bottom of the page and you learn more stuff, and sometimes the footnote takes you to another book, which has more stuff, and maybe more footnotes, which gives you even more stuff underneath the other stuff, and if you're really lucky sometimes the footnotes have footnotes. (I swear I've seen it happen!) I need to stop before I get too excited.

The Annotated Flatland takes a beloved nerdy book and makes it even nerdier with the addition of tons of footnotes. So in case the story of people literally living in two dimensions wasn't confusing enough for you, now you can delve even further into this weird mathematical world.

Footnotes can even be a literary device. House of Leaves could have been your standard haunted house horror story, but instead it's made up of a manuscript with scribbled thoughts in the margins, and it only goes down the rabbit hole from there. I'm not going to explain it. Just read it.

And you can't talk about footnotes without talking about David Foster Wallace, whose legendary annotations can be more entertaining than his actual essays. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again spans the worlds of tennis, David Lynch and cruise ships. If you want more and listen to Consider the Lobster on audiobook, the footnotes are even recorded in a slightly different pitch so you can tell the difference.

This glut of information has gotten me all worked up. Don't get me started on appendices.